Big Tech and Your School

3 WAYS TO ADAPT YOUR LINKEDIN ADS: Advertisers are dealing with new search habits, new performance benchmarks, and new budget restrictions during COVID-19. Wordstream suggests the following 3 tactics to adapt your LinkedIn ads right now:

• Stop focusing only on sales: The best approach to take is to shift into a helpful and/or educational role.
• Continue full-funnel marketing: With company budget freezes and consumers struggling to pay bills, it’s easy to assume the buying process for many is much longer (and difficult) now than it was at the beginning of the year. In reality, many are actually going through the buying process quicker than ever before.
• Build Audiences cautiously: some people are using new or different devices while working from home, and their locations have changed. This can impact who falls (and no longer falls) into your existing target audiences.

Why you should care: Many schools have been slow to update messaging to students and prospective students, which suggests they probably haven’t updated digital advertising audiences and targeting criteria either. COVID-19 is transforming habits, altering the medium on which prospective students consume news and information, and potentially even the devices they use the most. Now is the to tweak your digital advertising audiences to keep pace with these changes.

GOOGLE’S MAY CORE UPDATE WAS A BIG ONE: Two weeks ago, Google released a massive core update, shuffling Google search results even more than the large January update. SEMRush data showed the industries most impacted by the update were travel, real estate, health, pets & animals, and people & society. Education was not as heavily impacted. Volatility, or the rate at which Google’s search results change for a website or group of websites, was only a 4.2 out of 10 for education while real estate and travel had a volatility score of 6 post-update.

Why you should care: It’s hard to figure out what you need to do to reverse any algorithmic hit your site may have seen. When it comes to Google’s core updates, it can leave you even more at a loss of what to do. While the education sector hasn’t been hit hardest by the update, If your site in particular has negatively been hit, “it’s often recommended to step back from it all and take a wider view of your overall website and see what you can do to improve the site overall.”

A PENDING DISRUPTION FOR THE COLLEGE EDUCATION MODEL: MIT@Google? iStanford? HarvardxFacebook? According to Scott Galloway, an NYU marketing professor, partnerships between the largest tech companies in the world and elite universities will emerge in the post-COVID era. When schools begin to experience a 10-30% drop in registrations for the fall, universities will be forced to try dramatic measures to expand enrollment. At the same time, Galloway predicts that “Big-tech companies will enter education... not because they want to but because they have to,” in the battle to prove huge growth to stockholders.

Why you should care: The coronavirus is forcing people to take a hard look at the tuition they’re spending. Is the value of an education over Zoom worth as much as the in-person experience? Summed up bluntly by Galloway, “There’s this horrific awakening being delivered via Zoom of just how substandard and overpriced education is at every level.” With a growing need to increase enrollment and a demand for significantly lower priced education delivered primarily online, big tech and prestigious education could partner with schools to offer hybrid online-offline degrees at an affordability and value which will alter the landscape of higher education.

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